Fred Barnes Hates Youtube

It's fascinating to watch in the wake of the CNN/Youtube debate the dismay by Republicans. For example, Fred Barnes, a Fox News commentator, reviled the questioners as unibomber look-alikes and CNN for selecting questions that would embarass the Republicans.

Here is how Brent Baker puts it:

Describing the agenda of questions CNN chose to pose, during its Wednesday night Republican presidential debate with YouTube, as “completely different” from those forwarded to Democrats in July, Fred Barnes, on Thursday's Special Report on FNC, cited the contrast in questions about the military and Iraq as demonstrating how CNN picked the questioners to “screw Republicans” and “boost Democrats.” .

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-baker/2007/11/30/fred-barnes-cnns-debates-screw-republicans-boost-democrats

And from Jonathan Martin's blog:

The questions chosen seemed to reflect a Manhattan elite caricature of what defines the Republican party. And as Barnes gets at, there were few (if any) questions about kitchen table issues like education, health care, energy, jobs, and the mortgage crisis that many Republicans, as well as millions of other Americans, care about. Instead, it was all the conservative hot buttons, real (immigration) and perceived (Rebel flag).

http://www.politico.com/blogs/jonathanmartin/1107/Conservatives_rage_against_CNNYouTube.html

It's true that some of the folks that appeared on these videos seemed to be running shy of all four cylinders, such as the chap who shook his Bible at us and the other guy who threw a rifle through the air. But my overall reaction to this tempest in a teapot is: so what?

Let's accept the stipulation that media outlets such as CNN, Fox News, the Wall Street Jounral, and the New York Times have their axe to grind in their news coverage. The way I see it is that there are no bad or unfair questions. There are only bad answers. And if a president want-to-be cannot answer such questions or turn such questions to his own advantage, how can we expect him to do the same on the world stage?

It has always bothered me that President Bush has generally only allowed questions from sympathetic audiences, which only reinforces his reality in contrast to what might really be happening. I attribute the erosion of pubic support in Bush's Social Security initiative. He never allowed a real debate to take place and in the absence of a real debate, Americans embraced the status quo.

Things are not any better on the Democratic side with the Clinton campaign planting soft-ball questions.

Eventually, someone from one of those two debates is going to go head to head with allies and tyrants. There will be a lot of unfair questions, and the new president will need to be able to handle any of them without crying about boycotts and do-overs.